Making It Count: Students Work To Catalog Circle B's Frogs, Snakes

Saturday

Nov 24, 2012 at 5:00 AM

If you want to know what flies and flutters at Circle B Bar Reserve, someone can hand you a list. If you want to know what slithers and hops, they'll have to get back to you. A small group of students from Florida Southern College has begun work to come up with a better answer. They're conducting the first-ever survey of the popular nature park's reptiles and amphibians.

By TOM PALMERTHE LEDGER

LAKELAND | If you want to know what flies and flutters at Circle B Bar Reserve, someone can hand you a list.

If you want to know what slithers and hops, they'll have to get back to you.

A small group of students from Florida Southern College has begun work to come up with a better answer.

They're conducting the first-ever survey of the popular nature park's reptiles and amphibians.

Some, such as alligators, are a given.

Others, such as Eastern ribbon snake, are much less obvious.

Circle B covers 1,275 acres along the northwest shore of Lake Hancock. It was purchased in 2000 and has been attracting wildlife enthusiasts ever since.

This is the third formal survey of this type and it probably won't be the last word on species variety.

In 2004, local birdwatchers organized a yearlong monthly survey of bird life.

They came up with 158 species.

Since then more species have been spotted, bringing the total to close to 190.

About the same time, local butterfly enthusiasts worked to come up with a companion species list that totaled 48 species. That list has grown to at least 50 species.

Ashley Pelegrin, a senior majoring in environmental science, is leading the project in consultation with professors Gabriel Langford and Joe Macedonia.

The work started in September at the beginning of the school year and will continue indefinitely, Pelegrin said.

Unlike previous surveys in which participants walked the property and reported whatever species they encountered, this survey relies on catching the animals, marking them and releasing them.

The students use something called a drift trap.

It consists of a long piece of sheet metal buried in the ground that forms a barrier that forces animals toward a small narrow mesh screen enclosure that traps them.

Some of the traps have canopies above them and wet sponges inside to prevent the animals from becoming dehydrated or overheated.

Each of the three drift traps is placed in different types of habitats.

The traps, which are placed in out-of-the way sections of the preserve to reduce the chance they'll be disturbed by people, have been located in coordination with Circle B's staff.

Tabitha Biehl, stewardship coordinator for the Polk County Environmental Lands Program and a biologist herself, said she welcomes the study to give them more data on what lives at Circle B.

"We don't have a complete list," she said.

Florida Southern's Langford said Biehl approached him about the project to fill an information gap.

"Joe Macedonia and I jumped at the opportunity because we both love herpetofauna and want to know more about the distribution and abundance of these fascinating animals in Central Florida," Langford said, adding it also gives his students an opportunity to conduct a real professional wildlife survey.

"Hopefully this experience will help secure positions in wildlife biology for some of these students," he said.

Biehl said she welcomes research projects as long as they're "meaningful," explaining she's more interested in something that provides some useful information rather than one that simply involves collecting specimens.

"We don't get that many requests," she said, adding that they'd welcome more, either at Circle B or at one of the other sites located in various habitats around the county.

"We also ask them to give us a copy of their results," she said.

So far the students have surveyed only terrestrial habitats, but eventually will be doing more aquatic surveys.

The results have been slow to come.

The tally comes to three species of snakes, seven species of frogs and toads and one species of lizard.

Sometimes the traps are empty of anything except insects.

And the effort is more than simply coming up with species lists.

They also hope to get an idea of the relative density of each of the species, said Christian Winer, one of the other students involved in the survey.

Langford said the results will also give Circle B visitors a better understanding of the diversity of reptiles and amphibians around them.

To learn more about the survey, go to circlebsurvey. weebly.com.

[ Tom Palmer can be reached at tom.palmer@theledger.com or 863-802-7535. Read more views on the environment at http://environment.blogs.theledger.com/. Follow on Twitter @LedgerTom. ]

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